New York|Making a Pro Debut at Boxing’s Mecca, 126 Pounds of Irish Moxie

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Making a Pro Debut at Boxing’s Mecca, 126 Pounds of Irish Moxie

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Michael Conlan will headline the main boxing event at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, his first professional bout.CreditCreditAnthony Geathers for The New York Times

By Wallace Matthews

March 16, 2017

It sounds like the kind of St. Patrick’s Day that could only happen in a John Ford movie: parading, pageantry and a pint or two, finished off with an old-fashioned donnybrook.

That is how Michael Conlan, of Belfast, Northern Ireland, will spend his first St. Patrick’s Day in New York. That is, minus the first two activities.

Mr. Conlan, 25, a featherweight boxer known as Mick who has never fought a professional bout, will headline the main boxing event at Madison Square Garden on Friday night.

How this came about has more to do with Mr. Conlan’s Irish temper than with his fighting skills, but Bob Arum, a well-known boxing promoter, is betting that the two will come together in a lucrative way.

When Mr. Arum agreed to bankroll Mr. Conlan’s career, he was not buying a fighter so much as an attitude.

Without ever having seen the boxer in a pro fight — in fact, Mr. Conlan’s last bout was an amateur defeat — the Las Vegas-based fight promoter who jump-started the careers of Mike Tyson, Roberto Durán and Floyd Mayweather Jr., among many others, decided to invest a five-year contract and a six-figure signing bonus in 126 pounds of Irish moxie.

On Friday night, he will get the first real look at his investment.

“It’s going to take time, but we think this kid is going to be huge,” Mr. Arum said.

Mr. Arum is starting small: The fight is not in the Garden’s main arena, but in its 5,000-seat adjunct, The Theater. But the fact that a non-American, non-heavyweight, non-gold-medal-winning Olympian is making his pro debut in the feature bout at the mecca of boxing is virtually without precedent.

And the presence of Conor McGregor, a fellow Irishman and a mixed martial arts superstar who will lead Mr. Conlan into the ring carrying the tricolor Irish flag, is a blatant nod to a millennial demographic that boxing would love to capture.

Throw in the spectacle of St. Patrick’s Day and you’ve conjured up a perfect Irish celebration.

That all of this doesn’t answer a lingering question — can Mr. Conlan actually fight? — is almost beside the point.

He was a bronze medalist at the London Olympics in 2012, then won the gold medal at the 2015 amateur World Boxing Championships. He was favored to win gold in Rio in 2016 before losing a hotly disputed decision to Russia’s Vladimir Nikitin in their quarterfinal match. Some have called it the worst Olympic robbery since Roy Jones Jr. lost out on a gold medal at the 1988 Games in Seoul.

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Mr. Conlan, right, defeated Aram Avagyan of Armenia at the 2016 Olympics in Rio before losing in the quarterfinals.CreditDean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images

Still, it wasn’t what Mr. Conlan did in the bout, but after it, that changed everything.

Stung by the decision, Mr. Conlan extended both middle fingers toward the judges. Then, in a live television interview, he went on a profanity-laced tirade about the corruption of amateur boxing judges. He capped it all off by taking to Twitter to accuse President Vladimir Putin of Russia of paying off the organization that regulates amateur boxing.

“I basically went crazy on TV,” Mr. Conlan said in an interview. “I worried that no one would want to have anything to do with me after that.”

On the contrary, it was precisely that display of temper that endeared the boxer to Mr. Arum.

“I would have reacted the same,” Mr. Arum said. “That’s what made me love him.” If he had been another ordinary fighter who may have been cheated, “who cares?” Mr. Arum added. “That happens all the time. But here was this bright light, this tremendous kid taken advantage of, and he let the world know it.”

So, virtually sight unseen, Mr. Arum and his stepson, Todd duBoef, president of Top Rank Boxing, Mr. Arum’s promotion company, lured Mr. Conlan away from two British promoters, Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn, who were also wooing him.

“Our financial risk here is huge,” Mr. duBoef said. “It’ll take many years to recoup our investment. We’re not going to make it back in six-round fights.”

Certainly not in Friday’s six-rounder against Tim Ibarra, a journeyman featherweight with a 4-4 record. But Mr. Ibarra will be battling more than just Mr. Conlan: The two dozen supporters Mr. Ibarra is bringing along from his hometown, Denver, may be overwhelmed in the sold-out Theater by some 2,000 fans said to be flying in from Ireland for the bout.

“He won’t know what hit him,” Mr. Conlan said.

Mr. Arum’s grand plan is to market Mr. Conlan to the sizable Irish and Irish-American boxing community in the United States in the same way Top Rank successfully marketed Julio César Chávez Jr. of Mexico and Miguel Cotto of Puerto Rico to the Hispanic market. Having established a Cotto fight at the Garden as an annual event coinciding with New York City’s Puerto Rican Day Parade, Mr. Arum intends to do the same with Mr. Conlan: He said he had reserved the Garden for the next five St. Patrick’s Days.

“I don’t follow MMA, but look at how this Conor McGregor guy has captivated the public,” Mr. Arum said. “We think Conlan can do the same thing in boxing.”

Mr. McGregor and Mr. Conlan struck up a friendship over Twitter, and when Mr. McGregor needed a sparring partner for a fight last year, he sought Mr. Conlan’s advice. Mr. Conlan connected him with an Irish middleweight fighter, and the two men have been close ever since.

In December, during a joint appearance in Belfast, Mr. Conlan did something that few fighters have been able to do to Mr. McGregor: put him on the spot. Before an audience, the boxer asked Mr. McGregor to walk him into the ring at his pro debut. Mr. McGregor had no choice but to agree.

It will be 4 a.m. in Belfast by the time the bell rings, but there is no doubt in Mr. Conlan’s mind that he’ll have plenty of witnesses back home.

“It’s our national holiday, the biggest day of the year for Ireland,” he said. “Of course everyone will be watching. You just couldn’t make this up.”

Maybe Mr. Ford could have. Like Mr. Arum, he understood that St. Patrick’s Day was all about the green.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: 126 Pounds of Moxie From Northern Ireland Meets Boxing’s Mecca. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe